NFTs are the new Beanie Babies

NFTs are speculative mania in its purest form.<p>An NFT confers zero legal ownership over the underlying JPEG - without an intellectual property contract attached, you have no claim. You own the pointer to the image, and that&#x27;s it.<p>Moreover, it&#x27;s fairly clear that the NFT isn&#x27;t about the art, either - the most popular NFTs are just series of procedurally generated crap, from 400pixel avatars to literal rocks.

C2PA is an actual serious attempt to figure out the problem of cryptographic claims over media, but doesn&#x27;t attract the same type of attention because it isn&#x27;t associated with blockchain boosters. That&#x27;s a shame.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;c2pa.org&#x2F;public-draft&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;c2pa.org&#x2F;public-draft&#x2F;</a>

From what I can tell Beanie Babies were not a pump and dump scheme.<p>There&#x27;s a high likelihood that a lot of NFTs are getting bid up by the sellers.

Beanie Baby mania was rational as there was a seemingly irreperable supply chain problem.<p>The floor prices dropped when the founder shocked the market by fixing the problem with a new vendor and flooding the market.<p>Like any good trade, there were many people hoarding beanie babies after the fundamental circumstance had changed hoping the prices “bounced back”, but that doesnt mean there wasnt a rational trade at some point.<p>Honestly most comparisons to speculative bubbles are wrong, whether it is about Tulips or Beanie Babies. It seems all the commodity and commodity derivatives bubbles have an economic component, and the equities bubbles are the more dubious ones, such as the South Sea Bubble or the 90s tech bubble. It makes more sense to use equities bubbles as better examples of irrational exuberance.

The thing I found intriguing about this is it implies some sort of vague stigma to using NFT&#x27;d images, eg. setting them as your profile picture on twitter, unless you paid for them. Are there really people who would think ill of you for doing that?

Beanie Babies were actually cute, and well made toys. They still have that intrinsic value even when dug out of Grandma&#x27;s closet today.<p>NFT&#x27;s haven&#x27;t got even that much going for them, so far as I can tell. History may recall we used this digital wailing wall for a while; but who will care enough to dig that deep into the minutiae of the silly season when the larger questions are so much more interesting, like &quot;why didn&#x27;t they see what was happening to their society?&quot;

You&#x27;d only think this if you had no idea how the art world works. It&#x27;s more just what&#x27;s always been happening forever but now you know about it and its easier for anyone to get involved.

The problem with that article is it confuses NFTs with NFTs being used as collectibles.<p>It’s like criticising the JPG file format because a lot of people use it to just store pictures of cats.<p>The practical use-cases for NFTs, tokenisation of real world items, identities, proofs, certificates etc., goes far beyond the collectibles market.<p>NFTs are going to play a massive role in our lives in the future. Criticising them because of one trivial (albeit lucrative) aspect is missing the forest for the trees.